Which authors would you put near the top of the pile? I'd say Gibson as one of the better ones, and you certainly can't call him a wannabe by any stretch of the imagination, but I'll certainly grant that (a) his books could be called "art books" and (b) after Neuromancer and a couple of others around that time, the subsequent ones just milked his arty formula, but not quite as well. But frankly, I haven't read a whole lot of SF authors lately that I would rank a heck of a lot higher.
GNU/Linux is too unwieldy: Gnux is the answer!!
on
The Stallman Factor
·
· Score: 2
"you may have to reset your expectations to find it" - ain't that the truth. So much of the whinging about jobs right now seems to come from the "but I won't be earning the bubble-economy salary and the stock options and have nerf wars at work" attitude, it's hard to tell whether there's really a problem, or just a bunch of kids whose expectations have been warped out of all proportion to their abilities.
Re:My Outlook on Modeling
on
Agile Modeling
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, but expressing deep inheritance hierarchies with wood and paper gets a bit tricky, and objects with large relational cardinalities require extreme care to hook up - doesn't really qualify as "agile"!
Emailing these models can also be a bit of challenge...
Go away. Your UID is too low to be allowed to make that kind of comment.
Pretty rich, coming from a >200K UID. Are you saying you thought the linked article was actually amusing (in what universe???), or do you simply object to the obvious being pointed out?
The editors are doing their bit to keep the spelling on this site consistent - we should applaud them for their efforts. Given that you have a sub-50K user ID, I would have thought you would have figured that out by now!
Or perhaps it's just taken you this long to reach the point where you couldn't take it any longer? You must be a postal employee...
I find Evolution 1.0.3 to be pretty much unacceptable on large mailboxes (>1000 messages) on a dialup connection (on my laptop, when travelling). A Send/Receive causes it to clear the mailbox you're looking at and it then refreshes painfully slowly. It seems to be doing something other than simply downloading headers, since it takes so long compared to e.g. MS Outlook, which handles IMAP surprisingly well.
I was kinda hoping Evolution would allow me to kick my Outlook dependency, but no such luck so far...
Religion and spirituality, like most things, must be tailored to the audience for which it is intended. Thousands of years ago, a relatively primitive uneducated audience needed simple, unambiguous messages from an authoritarian source in order to maintain social cohesion and better withstand intergroup competition.
Perhaps things aren't so different today - many people, while benefitting from more widespread, comprehensive education, still haven't received much meaningful religious or spiritual education. Spiritual education is where sex education was fifty years ago, one of the last bastions of ignorance in modern civilization.
But nevertheless, the audiences for spiritual messages cover an enormous spectrum, ranging from those who still seem to need the simple messages from thousands of years ago, to those who are capable of understanding far more complex and ambiguous truths. It's difficult for these groups to communicate between each other, and most attempts to do so are futile - just as attempting to teach sub-atomic physics to a jungle-dwelling Aztec might be futile, or the Aztec's attempt to explain their theory of human sacrifice to us.
The amusing thing is that we have to tolerate these spiritual cavemen, for their indocrinated beliefs are unshakeable; yet they continually attempt to "convert" us, demonstrating a lack of tolerance which actually goes against the religions they claim to espouse. I used to find this annoying, until you realize how truly sad it is.
My heart goes out to anyone trapped in a network of 4000 year old propaganda, which is so closely enmeshed in our social structure that only the most intelligent and self-aware can find their way out of it - only to realize that it does perhaps serve a strange social purpose, and that we don't really have any good candidates to replace it. Ah, the human condition...
But hey, at least we know that the universe is 14 billion years old - that's something, right? Sigh...:)
Replacing fossil fuels doesn't "add energy"
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 2
I'm afraid your definition of "closed system" is just silly. Criticizing it isn't pedantic, it's correct.
If we replace our use of fossil fuel to generate energy with an equal amount of energy obtained from moon microwaves, there's no difference to the "current equilibrium". The point is that in the "closed system" that's really in question, both fossil fuels and external microwaves are external inputs. There's good evidence that our burning of fossil fuels *is* disturbing the equilibrium of the system. Replacing this with an equivalent amount of external microwaves would disturb it just as much.
A separate argument would be whether the abundance of clean energy from the moon would encourage greater energy use, but that's not the argument you were making.
Is it just me, or does this article read like a lame Sun attempt at astroturfing?
Yes, and like the NASA Deep Space 1 probe
on
Build Your Own UFO
·
· Score: 2
Yes, it's exactly the same principle as the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze air purifiers.
A variation of this principle does indeed work in a vacuum - it was recently tested on NASA's NASA Deep Space 1 spacecraft. It's the same basic principle of accelerating molecules by ionization, except that in the case of Deep Space 1, the molecules in question are supplied from a tank.
Good analysis, but you forgot to factor in the risk of TiVo going out of business, which based on their cash burn rate, could be within a year. So to really do this properly, you'd want to hedge against that possibility, perhaps by shorting TiVo shares...:)
According to general relativity, gravity propagates at the speed of light. There aren't any known shortcuts, even in theory, around the problem of communicating any information whatsoever faster than lightspeed. It might be possible to do something with quantum nonlocality, but I've yet to see a credible suggestion for doing that.
I saw Dean Kamen demonstrate the Segway at the Museum of Science in Boston a few weeks back. Yes, the Segway can go upstairs: they have a control in the handlebar that controls the wheels when you're not standing on it, so all you do is hold one handlebar and twist this "throttle", and it follows you up (or down) stairs.
The real reason the Segway isn't an option right now is that you can't get one. The company is concerned about legal ramficiations, and doesn't want a bunch of reckless new Segway users destroying their chances of getting favorable laws passed. So, they'll first be deployed by places like the US Post Office, and it'll be a while before you'll be able to buy one, other than at the eBay auction currently in progress.
The article quotes sociobiologist Richard Dawkins contemplating willow seeds floating through the air:
It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.
Looks like they've been racking up killer ping times for a few weeks now.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but ping times on high speed links (with no particularly slow routers or switches in the way) are primarily limited by the speed of light and the distance travelled.
So no matter how fast the bandwidth of this connection, if it's between the US and Europe, the ping times aren't going to be a whole heck of a lot better than they were before - the distance is the main limiting factor, and it's a pretty "hard" limit too, according to my old pal, Einstein.
Thanks for that masterful summary -/. should hire you as a real editor, i.e. someone who edits the work of excessively verbose, i-love-to-hear-myself-write "journalists".
Imagine, Katz articles might be transformed into concise, incisive pieces! (Whether the incision would be in the right place is another question entirely.)
I guess I'm seeking nothing less than a transformative revolution of the Katzian oeuvre, an utter obliteration of meaninglessly flowery linguistic conceits, an -- uh oh, I seem to have been infected...
Re: Barriers to Knowledge, and Business Models
on
The Future of Ideas
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Particularly universities, but also other levels of education all have barriers to prevent just anyone accessing knowledge. [...] The only reason these barriers to entry exist is because of the guarding of academic credit.
There's also the fact that many of the resource which universities provide are scarce physical or human resources, which have a cost. So the barriers you refer to at least in part (and probably in large part) exist for pure economic reasons - regulating access to a relatively scarce resource. As you point out, other extra-economic barriers are imposed, such as requiring good high school grades - but the primary reason for this is an attempt, albeit imperfect, to ensure the most productive use of a university's resources.
As some of the knowledege resources become available electronically, some aspect of this equation will change (e.g. the web-based MIT OpenCourseWare). As always with economics in a reasonably free market, things tend to move towards lower cost as they become cheaper to duplicate and therefore less scarce, and certain aspects of educational knowledge are no different.
But the fact is that barriers to accessing information create wealth.
An arguable point, I believe. The question which Lessig addresses centers around the artificial scarcity which is imposed on intellectual "property" by the law. An interesting question is to what extent imposing such artificial scarcity generates real wealth, as opposed to simply redistributing wealth from the consumers to the creators.
The only reason this is not considered a fundamentally unhealthy redistribution of wealth (of the kind that has occasionally occurred in non-capitalist countries), is that an exchange is considered to take place - exchanging licenses to intellectual property, for some other type of asset. One of the main questions at issue is what kinds of rights such an exchange should grant to the licensee, regardless of an individual creator's wishes.
Fair use doctrine was intended to address this, and did so quite successfully, at least from the consumer's perspective. Now, fair use is being undermined both legally and technologically, and consumers are being, or will be, screwed (technical economic term).
The most obvious battle here has nothing to do with destroying wealth - it has to do with maintaining a sensible balance between creators and consumers, that allows both sides to thrive, and neither side to be at the complete mercy of the other. The DMCA and other recent events have shifted the balance too far in favor of the creators, or rather, their agents. This is certainly beyond a workable compromise position, and if that isn't obvious to most people yet, it will become so soon enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Which authors would you put near the top of the pile? I'd say Gibson as one of the better ones, and you certainly can't call him a wannabe by any stretch of the imagination, but I'll certainly grant that (a) his books could be called "art books" and (b) after Neuromancer and a couple of others around that time, the subsequent ones just milked his arty formula, but not quite as well. But frankly, I haven't read a whole lot of SF authors lately that I would rank a heck of a lot higher.
Pronounced Gee-noox, of course...
"you may have to reset your expectations to find it" - ain't that the truth. So much of the whinging about jobs right now seems to come from the "but I won't be earning the bubble-economy salary and the stock options and have nerf wars at work" attitude, it's hard to tell whether there's really a problem, or just a bunch of kids whose expectations have been warped out of all proportion to their abilities.
Emailing these models can also be a bit of challenge...
Pretty rich, coming from a >200K UID. Are you saying you thought the linked article was actually amusing (in what universe???), or do you simply object to the obvious being pointed out?
Or perhaps it's just taken you this long to reach the point where you couldn't take it any longer? You must be a postal employee...
I find Evolution 1.0.3 to be pretty much unacceptable on large mailboxes (>1000 messages) on a dialup connection (on my laptop, when travelling). A Send/Receive causes it to clear the mailbox you're looking at and it then refreshes painfully slowly. It seems to be doing something other than simply downloading headers, since it takes so long compared to e.g. MS Outlook, which handles IMAP surprisingly well.
I was kinda hoping Evolution would allow me to kick my Outlook dependency, but no such luck so far...
Perhaps things aren't so different today - many people, while benefitting from more widespread, comprehensive education, still haven't received much meaningful religious or spiritual education. Spiritual education is where sex education was fifty years ago, one of the last bastions of ignorance in modern civilization.
But nevertheless, the audiences for spiritual messages cover an enormous spectrum, ranging from those who still seem to need the simple messages from thousands of years ago, to those who are capable of understanding far more complex and ambiguous truths. It's difficult for these groups to communicate between each other, and most attempts to do so are futile - just as attempting to teach sub-atomic physics to a jungle-dwelling Aztec might be futile, or the Aztec's attempt to explain their theory of human sacrifice to us.
The amusing thing is that we have to tolerate these spiritual cavemen, for their indocrinated beliefs are unshakeable; yet they continually attempt to "convert" us, demonstrating a lack of tolerance which actually goes against the religions they claim to espouse. I used to find this annoying, until you realize how truly sad it is.
My heart goes out to anyone trapped in a network of 4000 year old propaganda, which is so closely enmeshed in our social structure that only the most intelligent and self-aware can find their way out of it - only to realize that it does perhaps serve a strange social purpose, and that we don't really have any good candidates to replace it. Ah, the human condition...
But hey, at least we know that the universe is 14 billion years old - that's something, right? Sigh... :)
If we replace our use of fossil fuel to generate energy with an equal amount of energy obtained from moon microwaves, there's no difference to the "current equilibrium". The point is that in the "closed system" that's really in question, both fossil fuels and external microwaves are external inputs. There's good evidence that our burning of fossil fuels *is* disturbing the equilibrium of the system. Replacing this with an equivalent amount of external microwaves would disturb it just as much.
A separate argument would be whether the abundance of clean energy from the moon would encourage greater energy use, but that's not the argument you were making.
No, OOG THE CAVEMAN always talked in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS using PIDGIN CAVEMAN ENGLISH, like "I WILL BEAT ALL DRAGON"!
Are you related to OOG by any chance? Say hi to OOG for me, we all miss his caveman insights!
According to this page, the sun is disappears because of a Sun-Eating Dragon. Good luck in your dragon-hunting quest!
This is the best public policy idea I've heard for years. It could revolutionize corporate America!
Herds have poor impulse control...
That was pre-open source, when paying customers demanded well-rounded, finished systems...
Is it just me, or does this article read like a lame Sun attempt at astroturfing?
A variation of this principle does indeed work in a vacuum - it was recently tested on NASA's NASA Deep Space 1 spacecraft. It's the same basic principle of accelerating molecules by ionization, except that in the case of Deep Space 1, the molecules in question are supplied from a tank.
Actually, I was just parroting what someone else said in this thread. This is /., there's no place for informed opinion here!
Good analysis, but you forgot to factor in the risk of TiVo going out of business, which based on their cash burn rate, could be within a year. So to really do this properly, you'd want to hedge against that possibility, perhaps by shorting TiVo shares... :)
According to general relativity, gravity propagates at the speed of light. There aren't any known shortcuts, even in theory, around the problem of communicating any information whatsoever faster than lightspeed. It might be possible to do something with quantum nonlocality, but I've yet to see a credible suggestion for doing that.
The real reason the Segway isn't an option right now is that you can't get one. The company is concerned about legal ramficiations, and doesn't want a bunch of reckless new Segway users destroying their chances of getting favorable laws passed. So, they'll first be deployed by places like the US Post Office, and it'll be a while before you'll be able to buy one, other than at the eBay auction currently in progress.
Kinda takes the fun out of a troll when it can be blown to smithereens with one sentence, dunnit??
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but ping times on high speed links (with no particularly slow routers or switches in the way) are primarily limited by the speed of light and the distance travelled.
So no matter how fast the bandwidth of this connection, if it's between the US and Europe, the ping times aren't going to be a whole heck of a lot better than they were before - the distance is the main limiting factor, and it's a pretty "hard" limit too, according to my old pal, Einstein.
Imagine, Katz articles might be transformed into concise, incisive pieces! (Whether the incision would be in the right place is another question entirely.)
I guess I'm seeking nothing less than a transformative revolution of the Katzian oeuvre, an utter obliteration of meaninglessly flowery linguistic conceits, an -- uh oh, I seem to have been infected...
There's also the fact that many of the resource which universities provide are scarce physical or human resources, which have a cost. So the barriers you refer to at least in part (and probably in large part) exist for pure economic reasons - regulating access to a relatively scarce resource. As you point out, other extra-economic barriers are imposed, such as requiring good high school grades - but the primary reason for this is an attempt, albeit imperfect, to ensure the most productive use of a university's resources.
As some of the knowledege resources become available electronically, some aspect of this equation will change (e.g. the web-based MIT OpenCourseWare). As always with economics in a reasonably free market, things tend to move towards lower cost as they become cheaper to duplicate and therefore less scarce, and certain aspects of educational knowledge are no different.
But the fact is that barriers to accessing information create wealth.
An arguable point, I believe. The question which Lessig addresses centers around the artificial scarcity which is imposed on intellectual "property" by the law. An interesting question is to what extent imposing such artificial scarcity generates real wealth, as opposed to simply redistributing wealth from the consumers to the creators.
The only reason this is not considered a fundamentally unhealthy redistribution of wealth (of the kind that has occasionally occurred in non-capitalist countries), is that an exchange is considered to take place - exchanging licenses to intellectual property, for some other type of asset. One of the main questions at issue is what kinds of rights such an exchange should grant to the licensee, regardless of an individual creator's wishes.
Fair use doctrine was intended to address this, and did so quite successfully, at least from the consumer's perspective. Now, fair use is being undermined both legally and technologically, and consumers are being, or will be, screwed (technical economic term).
The most obvious battle here has nothing to do with destroying wealth - it has to do with maintaining a sensible balance between creators and consumers, that allows both sides to thrive, and neither side to be at the complete mercy of the other. The DMCA and other recent events have shifted the balance too far in favor of the creators, or rather, their agents. This is certainly beyond a workable compromise position, and if that isn't obvious to most people yet, it will become so soon enough.